Summary Bullets:

• Salesforce has integrated Slackbot more deeply into its platform, providing access purportedly to the entire Salesforce ecosystem.

• Despite positives the announcement generates concerns, the most pressing regarding security.

Salesforce has greatly extended the scope of Slackbot, the AI-driven personal work agent built into Slack, claiming it now spans the entire Salesforce platform. The change will add substantial value, keep Slack – the company – competitive with rivals, and cement the starring role Slack has come to play at Salesforce.

The new and improved Slackbot advances if not completes Slack’s emergence as a key member of the Salesforce organization. When acquired by Salesforce in 2021 Slack seemed destined to fall into a black hole, a Jonah being swallowed by the whale. Instead, it has been methodically elevated into a central gateway of the Salesforce platform. Slack has been increasingly embedded into Salesforce’s broader product fabric, positioned as the front end for Salesforce’s AI ecosystem and now evolving into the default collaboration interface for the Salesforce platform. Slack has been granted a new and better life by its parent.

In addition to accelerating its rebirth, the enhanced Slackbot benefits Slack by bringing greater value to users and keeping it neck-and-neck with rivals such as Cisco and Zoom, who are infusing their own platforms with the same type of cross-pollination.

This latest version of Slackbot enables users to get work done far more effectively by serving as a unified front across the Slack and Salesforce platforms. At the heart of the rejuvenated Slackbot lies MCP servers from Salesforce, the fuel behind the Salesforce ‘Headless 360’ initiative which seeks to harness capabilities anywhere in Salesforce and funnel them into Slack. Slackbot now acts as a conductor, overseeing an orchestra consisting of Salesforce products, enterprise data, third-party applications, and AI agents.

At a most basic level, users provide Slackbot a request through a natural language interface, and Slackbot fulfils it by pulling together relevant resources such as conversations, files, and data residing in multiple, often far-flung repositories. Users can, for example, update sales pipelines and surface next best actions, discover whether the marketing team is on track to achieve a forecast, or route a service case to the appropriate individuals. Over time, Slackbot gets to know users better, thus fulfilling their needs with greater speed and accuracy.

Despite the positives, there are some concerns associated with the announcement. The largest involves security. The security posture behind Slackbot is an open question and one with serious implications especially given the pooling and sharing of data which Slackbot facilitates; Salesforce needs to articulate clearly what types of safeguards are in place. Another concern is the lack of contact center capabilities to complement the collaboration capabilities found in Slack; a robust contact center portfolio has become critical for remaining competitive in the market. Last, despite rapidly accumulating AI-driven features on its platform and its association with Salesforce, the Slack name lacks the brand equity enjoyed by competitors. The likes of Cisco and Microsoft were well known in team collaboration well before the pandemic, and Zoom became a household name when it hit. Slack has not achieved the same notoriety.

If Salesforce can promptly address each of these issues, it could merit inclusion among the top players such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom.

The post Slackbot Spreads Its Wings but Questions Remain appeared first on IT Connection.

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprises are deploying AI agents leveraging Google Cloud’s solutions and achieving positive business outcomes.
• Google Cloud offers the full AI stack, and its sovereign cloud and cyber solutions are especially crucial for enterprise customers.

AI agents are no longer an idea. They are now being deployed by enterprises to improve internal workplace productivity and external customer experience. At Google Cloud Summit Sydney (held on June 25, 2026), more examples of agentic AI in operations were presented, moving from deterministic AI chatbots to more autonomous systems. Bunnings, a home improvement, gardening, and hardware products retailer in Australia, upgraded its Buddy AI chatbot that helped customers with product search to an AI agent that takes customers’ descriptions of their projects and fills the shopping carts with the products that they need. Bunnings indicated an uplift of conversion rates and basket sizes when customers engage with Buddy. Similarly, Woolworths supermarket has an agentic AI powered Olive assistant that is able to build shopping baskets from recipe photos and assist with proactive meal planning. These two examples demonstrate how AI agents trained with proprietary knowledge (e.g., Bunnings’s DIY catalog and Woolworths’ recipe catalog) can deliver greater customer outcomes.

Enterprises deploying AI will appreciate the importance of data. To benefit from AI, it is necessary for enterprises to tap into corporate data to impart knowledge to AI agents. Google Cloud has the advantage in this area since enterprises have been adopting its products such as BigQuery to manage their data more effectively. Moreover, the company has other associated products such as Google Maps, Google Search, and Google Workspace that customers can leverage to enhance their AI capabilities. Transurban, an Australian road operations company and toll road operator, works with Google Cloud to transform its interaction with customers. While customer relationships are mainly transactional, Transurban now leverages Google Cloud’s solutions such as Gemini Enterprise, BigQuery, and Google Maps to power its Linkt app with the “Linkt AI” assistant, which proactively suggests optimal travel routes and toll options, dynamically adjusts schedules for prevailing weather, delivers timely account balance notifications, and offers discounted hotel and attraction bookings for upcoming road trips.

Data is the most valuable asset for enterprises particularly in the age of AI. Many companies across jurisdictions are increasingly concerned about security and sovereignty. Google Cloud offers a set of options for enterprises to meet their data and AI sovereignty requirements. It addresses not just the issue of data residency but also operational sovereignty and software sovereignty. Firstly, Google Cloud Data Boundary helps customers to meet data residency requirements through a set of controls, e.g., regions where data is stored, compliance programs, and external customer or partner managed encryption keys. This option allows enterprises to enjoy the benefits of hosting data in the public cloud for operational flexibility and high availability. Google Cloud is also offering support services with personnel meeting specific geographical locations as well as monitoring capabilities with real-time alerts when organization policy changes violate the defined compliance posture.

For customers that have a more stringent requirement on operational sovereignty, Google Cloud Dedicated addresses the need by enabling solutions to be operated by an independent local partner. The solution is hosted in a standalone, local instance of Google Cloud. The local partner maintains exclusive control over security-critical systems, identity management, authentication, etc. as well as controls over communication between Google and the Google Cloud Dedicated environment. For example, S3NS (a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud that is headquartered in Paris, France) offers PREMI3NS services built on Google Cloud Dedicated for customers in Europe, now generally available in France. S3NS has achieved SecNumCloud 3.2 qualification from the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI). Google Cloud Dedicated is also available in Germany (in preview).

For clients with the most stringent sovereignty requirements, Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped allows complete isolation, without connectivity to an external network. The solution gives customers the flexibility to use general purpose compute and GPUs, and leverage open-source software. Google Cloud has also made its Gemini available in this air-gapped option, giving customers generative AI capabilities including automation, content generation, discovery and summarization. The GDC air-gapped solution is now deployed by many government agencies including those in Australia and Singapore within the Asia-Pacific region.

Besides sovereignty, Google Cloud has been bolstering its capability to offer stronger cyber defense. This includes the acquisition of Mandiant to add threat intelligence and incident response capabilities as well as Wiz for multi-cloud security defense. At the Google Cloud Summit, the company together with Wiz demonstrated how agentic AI can help to improve protection at scale and speed. Wiz is offering three AI agents with distinct roles: the Red Agent helps to uncover vulnerabilities and validate exploitable risks across web applications and APIs; the Blue Agent is the threat investigator that gathers evidence across cloud telemetry, runtime signals, and identity context to assess the severity of a threat and allow threats to be resolved more proactively; and the Green Agent is the investigation and remediation engine, identifying the root cause of a risk and the safest and most effective resolution. Wiz is known to provide security for cloud-native applications across major cloud environments including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle. Following the completed acquisition on March 11, 2026, Wiz joins Google Cloud but operates independently to maintain its brand and key value proposition.

Google Cloud offers the full AI stack including applications and agents, AI models, data platforms, and infrastructure. It has also demonstrated strong momentum through broad customer references. However, the ability to drive AI adoption ultimately lies with its partner ecosystem and its willingness to support third-party products (including AI models) and help customers operate within a multi-cloud environment. Consulting partners such as Accenture and Mantel Group were featured at the Google Cloud event, and these partners play a crucial role in helping enterprises develop their business strategy around AI and implement solutions addressing data, security, governance, and other technology challenges.

The post Google Cloud Summit Sydney: Putting Agentic AI into Action appeared first on IT Connection.

Summary Bullets:

• Australia’s digital infrastructure race is moving onshore, with long-haul fiber becoming as important as international subsea connectivity.
• Vocus and Telstra are expanding their terrestrial network to meet growing AI, cloud, and hyperscaler demand across key intercity corridors.

Over the last decade, Australia’s digital infrastructure strategy has largely centered on subsea cable investment, from new builds to strategic consortium partnerships. These new international systems have expanded capacity, improved network resilience, and strengthened Australia’s connectivity to the world. However, as artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes data traffic patterns, investment is shifting from beneath the ocean to fiber corridors underpinning Australia’s AI future.

Vocus’s recent announcement to build the country’s first ducted long-haul fiber route between Sydney and Melbourne is the latest example of this transition. Under its newly launched Australian Digital Infrastructure Platform (ADIP), the carrier will invest approximately AUD500 million ($346 million) constructing a new intercity fiber corridor capable of accommodating up to 6,912 fiber cores (3,456 fiber pairs), with services expected to commence in 2029. Vocus expects AI workloads to drive the majority of long-haul fiber demand by the end of the decade, as the Sydney-Melbourne corridor continues to emerge as one of the country’s busiest digital highways.

While the scale of the investment is significant, the real innovation lies beneath the fiber itself. Rather than deploying a conventional cable route, Vocus is constructing dedicated fiber ducts that enable additional fiber to be installed as demand grows without incurring repeated construction charges. The approach future-proofs the corridor, enabling capacity to be added quickly and more cost-effectively while providing greater resilience and protection against cable cuts. As AI workloads continue to surge, infrastructure that has been designed for continual expansion is likely to become just as valuable as the fiber it carries.

Vocus is not the only carrier in Australia preparing Australia’s terrestrial networks for the AI era. Telstra has already committed AUD1.6 billion ($1.1 billion) with the Aura Network, formerly known as the Intercity Fiber Network, creating a new national backbone designed to support enterprises, governments, hyperscalers, and cloud providers. The carrier has already completed its 357km Sydney-Caberra route, along with its 1,095km Sydney-Melbourne coast route. Future phases will extend the network to 14,000 kilometers linking Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane by end-2027.

Combined, Vocus’s Australian Digital Infrastructure Platform and Telstra’s Aura Network highlight a broader shift in Australia’s digital infrastructure strategy. Both operators are investing years ahead of demand, recognizing that AI training, inference, and distributed cloud applications are fundamentally changing traffic flows across domestic networks. As east-west traffic between data centers is growing faster than traditional enterprise connectivity, long-haul terrestrial fiber is becoming just as important as international subsea capacity.

The investment also marks a shift in competitive dynamics. Historically, carriers differentiated through network reach, technology, and pricing. Increasingly, competitive advantage will depend on who has the most scalable, resilient, and AI-ready infrastructure capable of supporting rapidly growing cloud and AI workloads. For hyperscalers and enterprises investing in cloud regions and sovereign AI capabilities, access to high-capacity intercity fiber may become just as important as proximity to the data center itself.

AI is redefining Australia’s connectivity priorities. While subsea cables remain essential for international connectivity, the next phase of investment is moving onshore. The race to build Australia’s digital backbone is no longer confined to the ocean floor – it is increasingly being fought across fiber corridors that will power the country’s AI future.

The post Beyond Subsea: Why Australia’s Next Fiber Race Is on Land appeared first on IT Connection.

Summary Bullets:

• Tata Communications is strengthening its global network to create an AI-ready digital corridor linking India with Singapore.
• As AI workloads grow, the India to Singapore route is becoming one of Asia’s most strategically important connectivity corridors.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping one of Asia’s busiest digital corridors. As AI workloads, cloud adoption and investment by hyperscalers accelerates across India and Southeast Asia, demand for high-speed, low-latency connectivity is rising just as rapidly. Tata Communications’s latest investment in new subsea cable infrastructure between India and Singapore is more than another cable announcement; it reflects a broader strategy to build an AI-ready digital corridor linking India’s emerging data center hubs with the Southeast Asia’s largest cloud ecosystem. With these investments, Tata Communications seems to be quietly assembling one of the region’s most comprehensive AI connectivity platforms.

This announcement reinforces the company’s commitment to expanding the Tata Global Network (TGN) through two complementary investments. The first is the I-2SEA consortium, where Tata Communications joins Lightstorm, Microsoft, and Singtel to deploy a purpose-built subsea system connecting India, Malaysia, and Singapore, with NEC serving as the system supplier. The cable will link Hyderabad and Chennai (India) to Singapore and Malaysia, with landing stations in Machilipatnam and South Chennai (India) providing geographically diverse routes that avoid congested maritime corridors. Strategically, Machilipatnam offers one of the shortest paths between Singapore and Hyderabad’s rapidly growing hyperscale and AI data center clusters. Once onshore, the system will integrate with Tata Communications domestic fiber network, extending connectivity to more than 100 data centers across India. The cable is expected to be ready-for-service by end-2029.

Alongside I-2SEA, Tata Communications will add 20 Tbps of capacity to the MIST Cable System, between Mumbai and Singapore. These investments build on the company’s broader AI strategy. In July 2025, it partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy a high-capacity terrestrial fiber network interconnecting the hyperscaler’s infrastructure across Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai. It has also launched the Tata Communications Izo DC Dynamic Connectivity platform, enabling enterprises to transfer large volumes of data and move in real time between data centers and multiple cloud environments.

Together, these investments highlight the importance of Mumbai and Chennai as AI and cloud infrastructure hubs. Chennai has become one of India’s leading data center markets, benefiting from its strategic coastal location linking it to critical subsea cable landing stations that provide low-latency access to global markets. At the other end of the route, Singapore remains Southeast Asia’s cloud and interconnection hub, making the route between the two countries attractive for enterprises, hyperscalers, and cloud providers.

Rather than simply adding international capacity, Tata Communications is positioning its network for the next phase of AI-driven infrastructure demand. As AI training, inference and cloud workloads generate more data center to data center traffic, network diversity is becoming as important as capacity. Today, Chennai and Singapore are connected by only one other direct system – the 24-year-old Bharti Airtel i2i Cable Network (i2icn) – highlighting why new geographically diverse infrastructure could become a critical competitive advantage in Asia’s emerging AI economy.

By strengthening one of Asia’s most strategically important digital corridors, Tata Communications is not just adding capacity; it is positioning itself to be at the forefront of the pack to capitalize on the increased demand for AI-driven connectivity. The question now is whether competitors will follow suit and accelerate their own investments or risk falling behind as the India-Singapore corridor emerges as one of the region’s most critical AI routes.

The post Racing to AI: Tata Communications Accelerates Its Connectivity Position to Singapore appeared first on IT Connection.